Abstract
Limited memory and bounded communication resources require powerful data compression techniques, but at the same time noisy tetherless channels and/or corrupted file systems need error correction capabilities. Joint source-channel coding has emerged as a viable solution to this problem. We present here the first practical joint source- channel coding algorithm capable of correcting errors in the popular Lempel-Ziv'77 scheme without practically losing any compression power. This is possible since the LZ'77 (as well as gzip) encoder does not completely remove all redundancy. The inherent additional redundancy left by LZ'77 encoder is used succinctly by a channel coder (e.g., Reed-Solomon coder) to protect against a limited number of errors. In addition to this, the scheme proposed here is perfectly backward-compatible, that is, a fiel compressed with out error-resilient LZ'77 can be still decompressed by a common LZ'77 decoder. In this preliminary report, we present our algorithm, collect some experimental data supporting our claims, and provide some theoretical justifications.